1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic equipment capable of reproducing contents such as a motion picture and sounds, and a highlighting method and a program to be implemented or installed in the electronic equipment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the past, a device with a built-in hard disk drive (HDD) has been commercialized as a recording/playback device for recording and reproducing contents that include television (TV) broadcast data. The device has the contents recorded and preserved in the HDD.
Such an HDD recording device can display, for example, a menu screen image, which presents a list of titles of contents recorded and preserved in an HDD, on a monitor of a television or the like. A user uses, for example, a remote controller or the like to select a desired content through the title menu screen image, whereby the user can reproduce the recorded content. After the user selects the desired content through the title menu screen image, the user presses a Finalize button. A submenu screen image is then displayed. Through the submenu screen image, the user can select whether the selected content should be reproduced from the beginning or from the middle thereof. When it says that a content is reproduced from the middle thereof, it means that the user wants to reproduce the content from a position at which the user has previously suspended the reproduction (refer to, for example, Non-patent Document 1).
Non-patent Document 1 can be downloaded from a Web page specified with http://www.sony.jp/ServiceArea/impdf/ (as of the date of application).
[Non-patent Document 1] Operation Manual for Channel Server CSV-E77
However, the device described in Non-patent Document 1 has a drawback that: when reproduction of a content is suspended in the middle thereof or when the power supply of the device is turned off in the middle of reproduction of a content, if a user wants to reproduce the content again, the user must select the desired content through the list of titles of a plurality of contents through the title menu screen image, and designate reproduction or reproduction from the middle of a content through the submenu screen image using the remote controller or the like. For example, the user may forget previously enjoying a content to the middle of the content. In this case, the user may be at a loss whether to designate reproduction from the beginning or reproduction from the middle of a content.
On the other hand, assuming that equipment for reproducing contents is designed compactly, if a user uses the equipment outdoors, the number of manipulations to be performed on buttons included in the equipment is required to be as small as possible so that the user will be relieved from the labor of performing the manipulations. In particular, when the user uses the equipment outdoors, if the number of manipulations to be performed on the buttons is large, it will annoy the user. Besides, the user is likely to perform incorrect manipulations.